This study will use discourse pragmatic approach. It is an interdisciplinary approach which integrates insights and analytic tools from discourse analysis, while maintaining a basic pragmatic orientation towards language use and meaning making ( Blum-Kulka and Hamo, 2006). Pragmatics is not the same as discourse analysis, but it would be impossible to analyze any text or discourse without having a solid knowledge of pragmatic principles and phenomena (Alba-Juez, 2016). Knowing the words and grammar of a language does not ensure successful communication because words may mean more than what they are said. The same words may have different meaning in different occasions. “Pragmatics is needed if we want a fuller, deeper, and generally more reasonable account of human language behavior” (Mey, 2001: 12). Therefore, pragmatics is an indispensable source for any discourse analytic study.
In the simple phrasing, pragmatics can be defined as “the study of language use” (Verschueren, 1999: 1). The view of language use in discourse pragmatics has two fundamental assumptions: first, the view of language use as social action; second, the view of language use as on-going meaning making (Blum-Kulka and Hamo, 2009). From the point of view of language use as social action, entrepreneurs are seen as interlocutors who have intentionally motivation to disseminate entrepreneurial spirit. From the point of view of language use as meaning-making, the language of entrepreneurs is far more than a collection of talks. It requires context to bridge between what is said and what is meant in order to understand the language use.
The actual language use of entrepreneurs talks is not limited to the words and grammatical analysis of isolated utterances. It cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic form. It should go beyond the isolated utterances because there are certain meanings and aspects of language that cannot be properly understood if the study is limited to syntactical analysis. The structure of entrepreneurs talk is not simply the sequential within and across utterances, but on the structure as an active process. In other words, what entrepreneurs are doing with words when they talk and what are the effects of their messages on the minds of audiences. This refers to discourse as communication by applying the theory speech acts.
2.2.2 Speech Acts
The theory of speech acts was found by John L. Austin, a British philosopher, in his influential collection of Austin’s papers How to Do Things with Words, published posthumously in 1962. Speech acts theory becomes a central entity in the study of language use and foreshadows many of the issues in pragmatic today. By devising the term speech act, he stated that when people are saying something (to make statements), they are doing something (perform actions). They do not only produce utterances containing grammatical and words, they perform actions via utterances. It is generally called as speech act because the action is performed via speech.
Austin (1962) distinguished utterances between constantives and performatives. Firstly, constantives are utterances that can be evaluated along the dimension of truth. In linguistics, this approach was adopted within an area known as truth conditional semantics (Thomas, 1995), for example, (1) The sun rises in the east. This utterance is an assertion or a statement. Secondly, performative utterances, in which it is not just to say things, but also actively to do things or perform acts. He noted that some ordinary language utterances are not employed to make statement, and as such they cannot be said to be true or false but can be evaluated by a dimension of felicity, a ‘happiness’ or expected condition necessary to the success of an utterance to perform. For example, (2) Good morning! The point of uttering such an utterance is not just to say ‘good morning’, but also actively to greet others. In other words, such utterances have both a descriptive and an effective aspect.
Austin noted that for a performative to be successful or “felicitous”, it must meet a set of conditions. He distinguished into three types as follows.
1.
(i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect.
(ii) The circumstances and persons must be appropriate.
2. The procedure must be executed (i) correctly, (ii) completely.
3. Often
(i) The persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intention s and
(ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant parties must do it.
Violation of any of the set of conditions above will result a performative infelicitous. As an illustration, if success story on entrepreneurship is not delivered by an entrepreneur, the condition 2 (ii) is not fulfilled or not observed, then what Austin described as a ‘misfire’ takes place.
In 1969, Searle developed Austin’s felicity conditions as constitutive rules. It derives from the principle that truth conditions must be met by the world for a sentence to be said to be true. Therefore, its felicity conditions must also be fulfilled by the world for a speech act to be said to be felicitous. According to Searle, speech acts is not only a matter of appropriate or inappropriate as Austin proposed in his set of felicity conditions, but they also jointly constitute the ilocutionary force. Constitutive rules means that to perform a speech act is to obey certain conventional rules that are constitutive of that type of act. Searle proposed four conditional paramaters:
1. Propositional content: the semantic content of the utterance.
2. Preparatory conditions: the necessary contextual features neede for the speech act to be performed.
3. Sincerity conditions: speaker intends/believes to do action.
4. Essential conditions: the convention of linguistic expression as an undertaking to do action.
According to Blum-Kulka and Hamo (2006) the conditional parameters proposed by Searle demonstrate the identification of speech act relies on linguistic features (propositional content), contextual features (preparatory and sincerity conditions) and cultural conventions (essential conditions). This way of thinking is easily comprehensible in analysing the felicity condition as pioneered by Austin. It will be adopted in analysing the felicity conditions of speech acts of successful entrepreneurs.
Furthermore, in performing communicative acts, Austin (1962) stated that any utterances simultaneously performs three levels of action, at which utterances are said to perform. They are locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. The are elaborated as follows.
(i) Locutionary act is producing the act of saying something. It is the basic form of utterance or meaningful linguistic expression.
(ii) Illocutionary act is the act of making meaningful utterance. Illocutionary act is “performing an act in saying something” (Leech, 1983: 199). In other words, illocutionary act refers to a speaker’s intention in delivering an utterance.
(iii) Perlocutionary act is an action or a consequence of saying something which affects the hearer’s thought or action in some ways. An utterance created which is normally intended to have an effect. The consequences or effects are being special to the circumstances of utterance.
Austin characterized ‘illocutionary acts by giving examples of certain general features as being governed by grammar, reference, and being made explicit by a performative verbs. He also developed a preliminary taxonomy of illocutionary acts:
1. Verdictive: An act that delivers a finding based on evidence (e.g. an estimate).
2. Exercitive: A decision for or against something, or a decision that something is to be so (e.g. an order or recommendation).
3. Commissive: An act that commits the speaker to a certain course of action (e.g. a promise or vow).
4. Expositive: An exposition of views (e.g. an affirmation or emphasis).
5. Behabitive: A reaction to other people’s behavior (e.g. an apology or expression of thanks).
Searle criticized Austin’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts for being failing to distinguish illocutionary acts from illocutionary verbs. He offered his own alternative taxonomy of illocutionary acts (Searle, 1979):
1. Assertive: An act that commits the speaker to the truth of some proposition (e.g. stating or claiming describing, reporting, announcing, concluding, suggesting, and predicting).
2. Directive: An attempt to get the hearer to do something (e.g. requesting, commanding, or ordering).
3. Commissive: An undertaking to do something (e.g. promising or vowing, offerring, swearing, threatening, warning, betting, guaranting, challenging).
4. Expressive: An expression of a psychological state of the speaker (e.g. a congratulatiing, apologizing, appreciating, complaining, condoling, greeting, thanking).
5. Declaration: An act that brings about the state of affairs mentioned in the propositional content (e.g. or resigning a position. baptizing, dismissing, adjourning a meeting, accepting, arresting, marrying).
However, Searle’s classification was criticised by Bach and Harnish (1979). The main concern is with the principles of classification. Bach and Harnish’s theory is called Speech Act Schema (SAS) which is manifested in a model of communicative performance. In the SAS, the relationship is one of inference: the hearer makes, and the speaker expects the hearer to make an inference to the speech act via the utterance, the communcative context, and operative presumptions about the nature of communication. According to them, the locutionary act refers to the speaker’s intended meaning, it is not with the meaning assigned to the utterance by the grammar. Successful communication, on their view, requires only that the hearer recognizes the speaker’s reflexively intended attitude. The distinction between the locutionary and illocutionary act is necessary because the former does not completely determine the latter, it merely delimits a range of possible illocutionary acts (e.g., I invite you may be an assertion or a promise). A third component, the perlocutionary act, is less important for them. The hearer’s task, then, is to work from the utterance to the locutionary act and requires hearer to have internalized the grammar of the language. They call this as the communicative presumption.
As for this research, Searle’s speech act taxonomy, redefining Austin’s (1962) taxonomy, will be applied since it has provided the best entry to the problem of classifying and analyzing speech functions. The taxonomy provides paradigms for the analysis of each type of act in the entrepreneurs’ language. It also provides a model of the relation between speaker, hearer and the world.
2.2.3 Indirect Speech Act
Universally, most of languages have three basic sentence types or structure: declarative, interrogative, and imperative that have three general communicative functions (statement, question, and command). For example:
a. You join the workshop. (declarative)
b. Do you join the workshop? (interrogative)
c. Join the workshop! (imperative)
Whenever there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function, it is categorized as direct speect act. However, whenever there is indirect relationship between a structure and a function, it is indireect speech act. If a declarative is a statement, it is a direct speech act. If a declarative used to make a request, it is indirect speech act.
Searle (1975) stated that indirectness is one of the most intriquing features of speech act performance. Indirectness occurs when there is a mismatch between the expressed meaning and the implied meaning (Thomas, 1995). In other words, the distinction between direct and indirect speech acts depends on whether or not one subscribes to what Levinson (1983: 264-274) termed as the ‘literal force hypothesis’ which means that “the view that there is a direct structure-function correlation in speech acts and that sentence forms are direct reflexes of their underlying illocutionary forces”.
There are three approaches to analyze indirect speech acts (Searle, 1975). First, there exists a dual illocutionary force. On this assumption, indirect speech acts have two illocutionary forces, one literal or direct, and the other nonliteral or indirect. Second, whether an utterance operates as an indirect speech act or not, it has to do with the relevant felicity conditions. Third, because of a speaker’s performing and a hearer’s understanding, an indirect speech act always involves some kind of inference. Then, how this inference can be assessed or how to measure indirectness is. Thomas (1995) suggested that the role of context, background knowledge, belief and co-text are important in interpreting indirectness.
Hence, some ways of performing indirect speech acts are so common, they have become conventionalised, or it is called conventional indirectness. For example, requests are often stated in an interrogative which actually asks about someone’s ability to do something, but is intended to get him to do that thing. e.g. Could you get the door?. On the other hand, non-conventional indirectness may lead to open-ended interpretation. For example: I’m tired, depending on the context, the interpretation may be: a request to take a rest or a complaint to particular condition.
In conclusion, the theoretical review in this study comprises with discourse pragmatics, speech acts and indirectness. The application of these theories is based on the nature of the language of successful entrepreneurs that view language use as social action and language use as ongoing meaning-making. The approach used in this study is discourse pragmatics since the language used by entrepreneurs is in the form of talks, sequences of communicative acts which uptake the audience/interlocutor’s role in negotiating meaning. Some utterances may have indirect speech acts that can be ambiguous and multi-layered in meaning. Therefore, context embedded is crucial in making interpretation.
Entrepreneurship has been a highly dynamic and fast growing scholarly field of research with long intellectual tradition. The concept of entrepreneurship has evolved in the last three centuries. Its intellectual roots can be traced back to the work of economist Cantilon in 1734 who firstly introduced the term entrepreneur, originated from French entreprendre, which means “to undertake”. In a business context, it means “someone who is active and get things done with risk-taking”, and the concept evolved to organization in 1834 by Jean Baptiste Say (Landstorm, 1999). In 1934, Schumpeter laid the entrepreneurship concept from organization to innovation as found in his publication, Economic Theory and Entrepreneurial History in 1965, stated that “entrepreneurs as individuals who exploit market opportunity through technical and/or organizational innovation”.
Entrepreneurship research gained some momentum on personality traits of entrepreneurs as the predictors of entreprepreneurship, that is pioneered by McClelland’s (1961) that qualities associated with a high need for achievement—preference for challenge, acceptance of personal responsibility for outcomes, innovativeness—characterized successful initiators of new businesses. This focus on personal characteristics continued (e.g., Timmons, 1978; Cooper et.al, 1988), despite its limitations in research design, methods and statistics used (e.g. Brockhaus, 1982; Wortman, 1987), until Gartner (1988) challenged the whole approach by arguing that the behavior of creating a new venture, not the personality of the founder, should be fundamental to the definition. However, other scholars have discussed the limitation of these approaches (Shaver and Scott, 1991) and argued that individual behaviour is not consistent over time nor personality traits predict behaviour.
As it evolved, some approaches emphasize on what entrepreneurs really do, why and how they recognize and evaluate opportunities. In his massively cited article (12,842 Google Scholar as citation as of November 2018), Venkataraman (in Shane and Venkataraman, 2000) defines and creates the boundaries of the entrepreneurship research field as” the scholarly examination of how, by whom, and with what effects opportunities to create future goods and ser- vices are discovered, evaluated, and exploited”. This also refers to entrepreneurial action or entrepreneurial behaviour – why entrepreneurs behave in the way they do (Georgellis et.al 2000; Pittaway, 2000). The study of entrepreneurial behaviour focuses on contextual and process issues (Ucbasaran et al, 2001). It means that the conception of entrepreneur is as a dynamic process-based phenomenon where there exists a continuum of entrepreneurial behaviour, some people may be more entrepreneurial than others. The concept of entrepreneurial behaviour then keeps developing to creation of new enterprises, which applied to the founder of a new business (Jones & Holt, 2008), from creation of new enterprises to rejuvenation of a mature organization (Rauch et.al, 2009).
There are many different perspectives on the notion of entrepreneurs. The differences occur because different range of economic activities becomes complex and heterogeneous with respect to the approaches and methodologies used. It is not surprising that a consensus has not been reached about what exactly constitutes entrepreneur is. While definitions of entrepreneurship have been published, no standard definition of entrepreneur appeared in the literature search (Brockhaus & Horwitz, 1986; van der Sluis et.al, 2008). Without clear definitions, individual researchers may make individual explanations and indefinitely continue in the limited knowledge in the field.
However, heterogeneity in definitions can be the source of richness and diversity. Other academic fields have successfully incorporated and made significant contribution to economics or business field, particularly psychology (in relation to entrepreneurial traits) and sociology (entrepreneurship as an organizing principle in society). Also, it should be clear that there are neither any definite boundaries nor one definition suitable for all. Instead, the concept is defined with the reference to its context and continuously adapted and adopted into new fields. In line with this, this present study adds another academic field derived from linguistics to identify and examine the lingual aspects of successful entrepreneurs.
Defining the success of entrepreneurs is difficult because researchers offer many definitions and the measurements of success varied among individual. Most of the research on the definition of successful entrepreneurs refers to personal characteristics. Other studies relate successful entrepreneurs to financial growth or wealth accumulation and non-financial factors; such as, education, self-actualization, and social responsibility.
The definition of successful entrepreneurs was pioneered by McClelland (1961) and relates to personal characteristics or traits. The qualities of successful entrepreneurs are associated with a high need for achievement. In 1987, he conducted further research by applying the method of Behavioral Event Interview (BEI) and found that proactivity, achievement orientation, and commitment to others are the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. However, some research findings showed that there are different degree of importance among various traits (Singh and Rahman, 2013; Khosla and Gupta, 2017; Setia, 2018).
The following researchers found different traits characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. First, Singh and Rahman’s (2013) research was based on primary data collected directly from 85 entrepreneurs of Assam by serving well structured questionnaire to identify the important traits of successful entrepreneurs. Descriptive statistic was used to summarize the data. Out of 14 traits variables, five important factors were finally identified with the help of factor analysis relating to successful entrepreneurs of Assam. They are innovation, futuristic mindset, risk taking ability, adaptability and commitment. Second, Khosla and Gupta (2017) found that there are five major traits of successful entrepreneurs that are essential contributors to the success of their business ventures:
1). Comfort with uncertainty,
2). Laser-like focus and execution,
3). Flexibility in response to market needs,
4). Big picture focus coupled with a detail orientation and
5). People management with the right balance of delegation.
These traits are the empirical evidence found by Gupta as a managing director at Kentrus Capital in New Delhi. Third, Setia (2018) examined the influence of personality towards successful entrepreneur. The personality of entrepreneur is based on The Big Five Model of Personality translating personality into 5 different profiles: conscientiousness, openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. Sample of this research were 39 successful entrepreneurs, measured by its business growth, profit and turnover growth, employment growth, and length of company’s survival. Result indicated that 1 out of 5 personality dimensions: conscientiousness showed the strongest significant correlation to successful entrepreneurs.
Other studies found that successful entrepreneurs refer to financial categorization, economic success or growth. The indicators are revenue, return on investment, wealth accumulation or profit because of entrepreneurial activities (Nicholas, 1999; Walker & Brown, 2004; Mokyr, 2010; Tortella et al., 2010).
Most often, the measurement of success was determined through financial achievement. However, success is recognized from both financial and non-financial factors (Walker & Brown, 2004; Manolova et.al, 2012). The example of success based on non-financial factor is when the longer one can survive business operation and prevent failure in business, the more successful one was (van Praag, 2001). Others believed success was customer satisfaction and respect (Reijonen & Komppula, 2007).
Furthermore, Djankov et al. (2008) specifically found the successful entrepreneurs are primarily determined by the individual’s cognitive abilities and higher education in the family. The results were based on data from a new survey on entrepreneurship in Brazil, of 400 entrepreneurs and 540 non-entrepreneurs of the same age, gender, education and location in 7 Brazilian cities. This may capture a sort of ‘social class’ effect or good ability of entrepreneurship with good education level may gain attention in public domain. This is supported by Casson (in Alvares et al., 2014), that business history needs to place more emphasis on the individual and less upon the firm as the key business actor.
The issue of successful entrepreneurs is further difficult to conclude a neat line between the success of the entrepreneur per se and that of the firm organization. On their recent study, Nuvolari et.al (2015) argued that because of information asymmetries and different cognitive capabilities, only some individuals are able to identify and exploit successfully the opportunities, while the nature of the economic environment (supply, demand, etc.) and specific individual attitudes (education, motivation, personality, etc.) are likely to explain why only a few succeed.
Differently, Schervish (2016) found that successful entrepreneurs are those who want to represent their self-actualization. Drawing on intensive interviews with 49 entrepreneurs, he discussed that successful entrepreneurs are those who move from investing one’s personal efforts in production to the spiritual secret of moral self-construction–assuming a more fundamental definition of self-fulfillment and the quality of social life.
Based on the above research, there are different views to indicate the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, most of them refer to personal characteristics even though the influences of other factors, such as, education, managerial experience, industry experience, and prior entrepreneurial experience are positively associated with their success. In addition, it is widely held that the successful entrepreneurs who have become top managers of their firms bear substantial social responsibilities—that they should ‘give back’ to the communities. It represents their self-actualization whenever they have achieve wealth accumulation, preservation, and reputation. As for this study, successful entrepreneurs are those who fulfill these characteristics, particularly, those who have gained public reputation and wealth accumulation, then provide their time to be mentors, to disseminate entrepreneurial spirit to people through language.
2.3.3 The Language Studies in Entrepreneurship
The following economics scholars conducted research by applying linguistics approaches to explain the entrepreneurial concept. Their research are on communication strategies, metaphor, and entrepreneurial mindset reflected by the choice of words. Research on the language of entrepreneurs which combine ideas of entrepreneurship and linguistics or language studies mainly discussed communication strategies and empowerment. As an example in communication strategies, Lefebvre and Redien-Collot (2013) found that persuasion, engagement, criticism and provocation are found to be strategies used in entrepreneurial mentoring dyads. Lefebvre and Redien-Collot used discourse interaction-centered theory which focus on interpersonal mentoring communication. Another study, Halim and Razak (2014) studied women entrepreneurs’ communication strategies.They found that leaders in entrepreneurship carried the role of Mother and Iron Maiden that demonstrate considerable personal power with their teams such as rapport talk, emphatic stress, negotiation and confrontational communication. Additionally, Sudarmanti & Bauwel (2015) found that women entrepreneurs tend to create open communication, focus on process of listening, persuading and showing care for others.
Some research use semiotics and semantics approaches in entrepreneurship and business. Management research investigates transnational transfer of firm in social semiotic approach (Brannen, 2004). For semantics, the studies are the use of theatrical metaphor as an addition to the repertoire of aids to understanding entrepreneurship (Anderson, 2005), the analysis of metaphors in both speech and gesture that are consistently used to emphasize agency and control and the predictability and taken-for-grantedness of a novel venture (Cornelissen and Clarke, 2010) and applying metaphor to define entrepreneurial concepts (Hirsky, 2015).
Other research on entrepreneurial mindset and language investigated the rhetoric of entrepreneurial practice. Gartner and Ingram (2013) found that entrepreneurs tend to characterize failure as positive and discuss positive failure using temporal (e.g., “fail fast”) and scalable (e.g.,“leverage it”) language. This reflects that entrepreneurs have positive mindset towards failure. Lynch et.al (2017) studied entrepreneurial mindset by analysing the linguistic content of entrepreneurs’ language, comparing successful entrepreneurs talk and the average entrepreneurs. By having corpus analysis, the evidence showed that several orientation-action, future, customer, collective, and growth are associated with entrepreneurial mindset. However, the identification of single words would not be sufficient to represent entrepreneurial mindset.
The studies on entrepreneurship and language above are mostly on the description of isolated language structures of entrepreneurs to explain entrepreneurship concept. They have not analyzed at actual stretches of connected text or talk. Therefore, this study aims to provide more information on sequential organization of talk as informing discourse structure and interpretation. Specifically, this study aims to identify forms, functions, and the effects of the language use of entrepreneurs to the audience as this area still needs documentation to understand the language as social action in enterprise culture.
2.3.2 Past Studies
Some research on speech acts in economics field have been done in different contexts, such as, in philosophical viewpoints, social media, and marketing. Block (2013) and Brisset (2018) discussed the application of speech acts on philosophical point of view, Eskelin and Sorsa (2013) researched assertive speect acts on economic facts and discourse, Ludwig and de Ruyter (2016) researched the application of speech acts in consumers’ social media communication, and Savetin (2018) researched strategic speech acts in price negotiation.
Block (2013) argued that the theory of speech acts is acknowledged as the applicable construct to explain ethical oath in economic institutions. He combined Austin’s speech act theory and Levinas’s theory on the philosophy to encounter other person. The background of his research is due to various causes of the economic crisis, and raised the question whether and how ethical oaths can contribute to the development of more ethical behaviour in economics and business. He introduced a performative concept of ethical oaths that is characterised by (1) the existential self-performative of the one I want to be, which is (2) demanded by the public context. Because ethical oaths are (3) structurally threatened by the possibility of infelicity or failure, the emphasis should be (4) the behavioural aspect of ethical oaths in economics and business. By having content analysis on the nature of ethical oath and code of conduct documents in professional community of bankers, economists or managers, he concludes that a performative concept of ethical oaths can contribute to more ethical behaviour in economics and business, because the performative involves action and behaviour. The self-performative character of ethical oaths requires policies that enable the reflection of professionals on ethical issues in education programmes, companies and professional associations. These policies will increase the self-involvement and internalisation of ethical oaths.
Brisset (2018) applied speech acts into methodological discussion about financial models by using Austinian vocabulary because model making is as an act in a scientific environment. Economists create models in an effort to find out how the world works and it is because they don’t already know how it works that they also don’t know whether they have an accurate model representation. Therefore, he argued that models perform actions in and outside of the academic field. This multiplicity of fields induces a variety of felicity conditions and types of performed actions. If, for example, an inference from a model is judged according to some epistemological criteria in the scientific field, the representation of the world which the model carries, will not be judged by the same criteria outside the scientific field. A model can be considered as a standard in a strict scientific framework, while not being used as part of public policies, or vice versa. The idea of speech acts to modeling is rooted directly in the claim that the function of a model as well as the epistemological criteria against which it is validated are defined by the scientific community within which the modeling practice takes place.
Eskelin and and Sorsa (2013) researched Economic Facts and the Politics of Economic Discourse by applying theory of speech acts. The purpose of this research is to study factual statements (or assertives) in economic discourse, which concern and construct social reality, referring to institutional logics. It can materialize as institutions when the statements are accepted as true. It analyzes the conception of speech acts as institutional entrepreneurship, as a social practice in which entrepreneurship is materialized in attempts to create, renew and transform institutions as political action. In orther words, the study examined how exactly facts are formed in economic discourse, how they serve as a means for rendering issues economic, and how they legitimize, renew and change institutions. The objects of analysis is the illocutionary or the perlocutionary aspects of the speech acts, while the referents of the speech acts can be institutional logics or actual institutions. The finding indicates that the study on the presentation of institutional facts has a large potential in helping to understand how facts can modify the actual institutions so that they are in line with the logics adopted in economic discourse.
Ludwig and de Ruyter (2016) researched on consumer marketing and speech acts. The purpose of their research is to draw on the theoretical domain of speech act theory and a discussion of its suitability for setting the agenda for social media research. Specifically, this research aims to explore a range of research directions that are both relevant and conceptually robust, to stimulate the advancement of knowledge and understanding of online verbatim data. The methodology used is cross-disciplinary research to identify on how recent conceptual and empirical advances in speech act theory may further guide the development of text analytics in a social media context. The finding showed that decoding content and function word use in customers’ social media communication can enhance the efficiency of determining potential impacts of customer reviews, sentiment strength, the quality of contributions in social media, customers’ socialization perceptions in online communities and deceptive messages.
Savetin (2018) applied Searle’s theory of speech acts as a tool to identify five illocutionary acts of voice recording from 20 conversations between sellers and buyers in markets in Bangkok, Thailand. The most frequent-used speech act was representative which meant sellers often used this type of speech act to inform the cost and price of products and the strengths of products. In addition, the perlocutionary act was also found in this study, that in price negotiation resulted the same effect in all situations. That was to say the seller agreed to offer discount to the buyer, as the researcher limited the research scope to only the situations where the buyer was successful in price negotiation. In the end of conversation, the buyers decided to purchase the product with negotiated price. The sellers agreed to sell at a bargain price.
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